Short Lists of Bad-Asses and More THREADBARE <3s

We couldn’t have been more thrilled by a review than we were by Kristen Sollee’s listicle of bad-ass feminist comics in Bustle. From her intro:

Like many kids, I devoured my fair share of comics growing up, but they were mostly of the dude-centric variety. When I finally discovered feminist comics in my teens, it was thrilling to see characters and storylines that more closely reflected the world I inhabited. These days, I’m particularly a fan girl of feminist comics that wield humor and irony like weapons — two things indispensable to dealing with life as a lady-identified person in the 21st century.

Give you feels? Us too. That’s part of why we made Threadbare, which Sollee calls “a gut-wrenching yet vital zine about exploitation, consumption and production … a serious slab of truth that should be required reading for every fashion-loving feminist.” Read the rest here!

When you look closely at widely publicized sex trafficking campaigns, you see less facts and more anti-sex, xenophobic mythologies. … What does stand out is a corporate agenda, a Christian Imperialist agenda, and an anti-sex work agenda. There is a capitalistic puritanical reign that perpetuates biased, moralistic notions of sex while reinforcing the “merits” of cheap, exploitative foreign labor. There is also the erasure of trans women and men in the sex industry. The anti-trafficking narrative criminalizes and endangers consensual sex workers and through lack of any other options pushes more women (cis and trans) in places like Cambodia, India and Haiti into the harsh, dangerous and often times worse-than prostitution conditions of the garment industry. Women worldwide are kept in poverty, and the same myth remains: sex work is sex trafficking, and a woman is better off in the sweat shop than the brothel. In Anne Elizabeth Moore‘s latest comics journalism expose Threadbare, we see these myths unravelling.

Women Write About Comics weighed in with a great conversation-as-review here, ending on this stellar note:

Readers who are searching for something they can do to combat the exploitative nature of the garment industry can help by expanding Threadbare’s reach. Tell your schools and libraries to purchase it, order it from your local comic shops and bookstores, and buy copies for your friends! Awareness is important; awareness can increase the number of people who try to vote for policy-makers who have these issues on their radar. Ultimately, there isn’t much we can do on an individual level, but we can spread the word.

Finally, there’s this delightful look, by Kevin Bramer at Optical Sloth. Worth reading in full, but here’s the kicker:

Even if you think you’re an expert on this subject I guarantee that you’ll find new information in here, and the comics are drawn by the some of the best artists working today. If you know any millionaires please tell them to throw some money at people who are looking to do this type of graphic journalism, because the world needs more of it.